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Facebook to Let Users Rank Credibility of News

107 pointsby peterkshultzover 7 years ago

44 comments

themagicianover 7 years ago
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa.<p>Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these numbers it would force people to think for themselves.<p>Same thing with YouTube. Fake News becomes real news when it had enough views, likes, upvotes, comments, etc.. These counts don’t really need to be shown to the end user.
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imgabeover 7 years ago
This seems very lazy on Facebook&#x27;s part. Rather than employing people who will research and fact-check, they&#x27;re punting the problem to the users. This whole situation arose <i>because</i> users are very bad at determining which sources are credible. People will believe anything that confirms their biases, and disbelieve anything that doesn&#x27;t.
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goaliecaover 7 years ago
&gt; “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.”<p>Is this truly ignorance or is it malice?
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emodendroketover 7 years ago
This is a frankly awful idea. I do not want Facebook acting as some sort of arbiter of what information is truthful. The cure is worse than the disease.
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oliwarnerover 7 years ago
Holy hell, Facebook! For a cash-rich company employing some of the cleverest people on the planet, you&#x27;re managing to be incredulously stupid here. People who aren&#x27;t qualified to rate sources should not be asked their opinion. If you want peer review, do peer review... But ask-the-audience isn&#x27;t that.<p>That all said, there is a redeeming possibility here. You could <i>also</i> do an in-house monitored, <i>qualified</i> peer review of select articles from popular sources and use those results to audit users. If somebody keeps hating on WaPo and pushing Fox you could make assumptions about the quality of their judgement.
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philipodonnellover 7 years ago
&gt; “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today [ed: because we rely on users to decide what can be trusted],” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.”<p>Its a bit tone-deaf, Mark. Remember the &quot;we had no effect on the election&quot; line that everyone laughed at? This year its &quot;user curation is the answer to fake news&quot;. Everyone is laughing at you again.<p>If you want to determine credibility, hire people to judge credibility. Hire a mix of viewpoints. Its not that hard, it just costs money, which you have more than enough of. Maybe give some of that money back to the users who turn over their online lives to you and actually improve their lives, instead of just monetizing them by feeding users garbage that gets them to click and consume while at the same time you go around complaining that users aren&#x27;t discriminating enough with those clicks and consumption.
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rdtscover 7 years ago
&gt; The same criticism has also engulfed other social media companies such as Twitter, which on Friday said it was emailing notifications to 677,775 people in the United States that they had interacted with Russian propaganda accounts around the time of the 2016 election.<p>Wonder if they included the part where they (Twitter) went to RT, which is pretty much Moscow&#x27;s propaganda arm, and offered to sell them $200k worth of adds geared specifically for US elections crowd.
tantalorover 7 years ago
You have been able to do this on Google News for a long time:<p><i>See more stories from preferred sources, and block news sources you don’t like.</i><p><i>- Under &quot;Preferred,&quot; list publications you want to see more news from.</i><p><i>- Under &quot;Blocked,&quot; list publications you don’t want to see any news from.</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;answer&#x2F;1146405" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;answer&#x2F;1146405</a>
marenkayover 7 years ago
Why not remove anything except from social interaction from FB instead of this?<p>IMHO anything on FB beyond connecting with people is worthless anyway and mostly driven by bots and not people these days.
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1024coreover 7 years ago
This is a genius move by FB.<p>Now it becomes a battle of which side can marshall more FB users to flag stories of the other side as fake. Which, in turn, results in more views and clicks for FB.
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alexgandyover 7 years ago
Bad or good, this is an admission of failure. Facebook just flat out said &quot;screw it, you all decide what&#x27;s real...because we sure as shit can&#x27;t.&quot;
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elcapitanover 7 years ago
This of course just shifts the problem to Facebook then ranking the credibility of users, on which they will base the raking of credibility of news.
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elorantover 7 years ago
This is so stupid. For one, people tend to have herd mentality. An article seen the wrong way could trigger an immense backfire where a medium&#x27;s credibility tanks in a matter of days. And then it would take years to reverse the damage.<p>Furthermore, it opens the way for anyone with a botnet of infected machines to rig the credibility of any news outlet to his liking.
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carwynover 7 years ago
They would be better off auto-blending articles at the other end of users&#x27; opinion spectrum into their news feeds (or comment threads) to try and burst the echo chambers.<p>&quot;Here are some articles at the polar opposite to your norms.&quot;
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dvtover 7 years ago
Slightly off-topic: are there any social networks out there <i>not</i> polluted by news -- fake or otherwise? Is there room for a new social network that&#x27;s for, you know, people?<p>Snapchat&#x27;s a tabloid, Facebook is basically a news RSS feed, and I&#x27;m even starting to get news &quot;stories&quot; when browsing hashtags on Instagram. I just want to discover <i>people</i> and talk to <i>people</i>. Apart from dating apps (Tinder&#x2F;Bumble&#x2F;etc.), it seems that all social networks have become news networks.
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severian1778over 7 years ago
ban certain users from voting on certain topics of even seeing them and game the system to always lean unfairly to your political leanings. no watchdogs, no transparency.
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srcmapover 7 years ago
Perfect for collecting more user attributes and use them as future &quot;targeted&quot; advertising.<p>Future Republican candidates can put out FB ads only target Orange County Voters who dislike CNN&#x27;s news article on Trump.<p>Democrat party can put FB ads asking for campaign contributions only from folks in SF that like CNN&#x27;s news article on Trump.
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willart4foodover 7 years ago
I can&#x27;t wait till 4chan gets wind of this one!
alkonautover 7 years ago
What they should do isn’t show me news that <i>I’m</i> likely to agree with, but news that nearly noone disagrees with. It should be very easy to notice what has both large numbers of people disagreeing and agreeing with, and people within the same social networks agree with eachother. That type of news could just be supressed. If all that’s left is news with kittens then that’s a glorious success. I can get actual news elsewhere, and Facebook can select a few publications of good quality and <i>replace</i> anyone that shares a breitbart article with a corresponding one from the guardian.
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romanovcodeover 7 years ago
This is a horrible idea in general, but very good for facebook.<p>Facebook users will be in even greater echo-chamber re-assuring their world-views therefore they will be more engaged with the website, and this is all FB cares about.
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jsjohnstover 7 years ago
I just wish they would implement a &quot;Snopes.com filter&quot; which marked things as proven false. I would say something like 1&#x2F;5 posts some of my relatives make is easily disproved by Snopes.
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HughGover 7 years ago
Will Facebook allow users to rate the credulity of other users? That might make this feature more useful ...
wyckover 7 years ago
I enjoy seeing FB sabotage thier brand into the ground, not because of it&#x27;s service, but rather because of it&#x27;s sess pool leadership.<p>My feed is basically a bullshit mill of news instead of actual &quot;freinds&quot; experiences. Even given the bullshit, a good % of the experience stuff is basically just selfie show-offs. It&#x27;s almost become a mirror of the self, with very little socially valuable interaction.<p>oh you&#x27;re on a beach ...like<p>oh you want to signal your virtue ..share<p>Facebook is starting to become the anti-social platform in the sense that it has an overall negative social effect.
xsterover 7 years ago
And Rome lets the mob run the Comitia Tributa via popularity contests, including dismissing opposition Tribunes.<p>I&#x27;d argue Rome died not in 476 but in -121 when the Senate killed Gaius Gracchus and didn&#x27;t realize they needed reform and create an actual political process that doesn&#x27;t lead to smooth talkers and thus tyranny.<p>I believe Plato&#x27;s and the Founding Fathers&#x27; preferred solution here would be for each individual to find the smartest willing person they know and let them offer their analysis for consideration.
davesqueover 7 years ago
So they&#x27;re now going to rank news stories based on the reported (i.e. <i>subjective</i>, not objective as they claim) familiarity and credibility of the source. It&#x27;s hard to know how this would help without more details. Does anyone have any more information on precisely how this heuristic is defined? I have my doubts that this could even work at all. It seems the whole lesson of recent events is that the average person is <i>not</i> qualified to judge the credibility of hardly anything.
ryandrakeover 7 years ago
When you let users contribute to any kind of measurement, it turns into a measure of popularity. It&#x27;s now a game of &quot;get enough users to do X&quot;. By relying on end-users to rate and rank things, we&#x27;re letting popularity stand in for all kinds of quality measurements. Lots of 5 stars on Amazon = must be a good product. Lots of Yelp reviews = must be a good restaurant. Lots of upvotes = must be a good comment. Talk about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results!
skate22over 7 years ago
A fraction of revenue from popular pages should fund a manual fact checking process that either temporarily grants or denies that page a trusted status.
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transitionnelover 7 years ago
I think Facebook&#x27;s main benefit from this is that they will now have users clicking a button essentially to say, &quot;yes, I believe this.&quot; Now they have a direct metric for what type of manipulation works for that user. Because really, no user can actually verify the truth of a media outlet&#x27;s claims without heroic efforts.
nazzover 7 years ago
What will be done in response to a bot storm?
ryan-allenover 7 years ago
I would expect people will downvote things they don&#x27;t agree with, I&#x27;m not sure how I see this working?
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alexc05over 7 years ago
So they&#x27;re going to ask general accounts to rank things for reliability in the era Russian &quot;bot-armies&quot; able to up-rank en-masse?<p>Suddenly they&#x27;re going to be able to buy credibility the way they buy likes?<p>I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;m a fan of this. I hope they&#x27;ve gamed that out.
cocktailpeanutsover 7 years ago
Before I go in, I must say this comment is not about politics , and I am not a Donald Trump supporter (I can&#x27;t believe I have to always prefix this before saying anything sane nowadays otherwise I get stoned to death online)<p>That said, here&#x27;s a story. One day during the presidential campaign I saw a person who normally really despised Donald Trump say &quot;Hey I hate him but I think he kinda made sense on his speech today&quot;. Remember she watched the speech because she hated him and was looking for every chance to make fun of him but instead came off rethinking things for just that speech.<p>Then the next day she watched a mainstream TV news anchors go through the speech, one by one line and criticizing, using Trump&#x27;s past history and etc. Then she said &quot;I knew it he&#x27;s an evil, he almost made me listen to him, so devious&quot;.<p>I normally never watch TV so observing someone else reacting completely opposite ways based on just a 30 minute TV show is when I realized how mainstream TV is shaping people&#x27;s minds and propaganda in 2018 is stronger than ever. Most people won&#x27;t want to believe that they are under heavy influence of political propaganda because their identity is connected to it, but that is the truth.<p>Just to be clear, this is not even about politics. This phenomenon is increasingly common across every aspect of the society. For example, if you look at what&#x27;s happening in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, it&#x27;s full of propaganda by people who have more knowledge manipulating people with less. The only way to overcome this is to:<p>1. Try to be as emotionally detached from the events as possible<p>2. Actually try to learn what is going on, instead of listening to what everyone else is saying, because even your most trustworthy friend, family, or even a very reputable nobel prize winner is under this influence unless they followed this principle, which most people don&#x27;t have time to engage in.<p>3. If you ARE that reputable person, be careful what you tell your followers. If you haven&#x27;t gone through step 1 and 2 and just saying &quot;This is who I am, I&#x27;m just expressing myself, take it or leave it, just unfollow me if you don&#x27;t want to hear what I say&quot;, you are being extremely irresponsible. You are basically taking your own gullibility and amplifying it to hundreds of thousands or millions of other people who are probably in less fortunate position that you are (which means they will suffer exponentially more from this misinformation than yourself)<p>Facebook doing this won&#x27;t help fake news, it will only accelerate what they are already guilty of, because most people aren&#x27;t even aware they are misinformed and furthermore don&#x27;t want to believe they are wrong. So it will only result in larger and larger filter bubble which separates people even more.<p>It&#x27;s like religion, when was the last time you were able to convince a religious person into believing that God doesn&#x27;t exist? Imagine telling people on Facebook to vote whether God exists or not on Facebook.<p>Personally I think there&#x27;s a huge opportunity hiding in this madness somewhere if you&#x27;re an entrepreneur.
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WillReplyfFoodover 7 years ago
A good way to prevent false stories, would be to reward users who take the time to find evidence to the contrary, with some gamified rank system. &quot;Mamothhunter of Lies&quot;
FloNeuover 7 years ago
This is really the best they can come up with... So much wow - no way someone can manipulate that... Glad the world is save again <i>tadatam</i>
FloNeuover 7 years ago
Wow - that&#x27;s such a high-tech solution... No way someone can manipulate that...
WillReplyfFoodover 7 years ago
Automerging similar comments would at least reduce the ilusion of a crowd.
ppbuttover 7 years ago
&quot;Facebook to let Users Rank Credibility of (pre-filtered) News&quot;
drderidderover 7 years ago
What could possibly go wrong. coughthatshowyougottrumpcough.
menckenjrover 7 years ago
If enough people believe something it must be true, right?
diogenescynicover 7 years ago
What a horrible idea.
ntrepid8over 7 years ago
What could possibly go wrong?
dundercoderover 7 years ago
This can only end badly.
menckenjrover 7 years ago
If enough people believe it it must be true, right? Right?
excaliburover 7 years ago
BuzzFeed. The most trusted name in news.
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